The Influence of Subjective Sexual Arousal and Disgust on Pain

ABSTRACT

Current models propose that inhibited sexual arousal is a key component in maintaining sexual pain in women with Genito-Pelvic Pain/Penetration Disorder. It thus follows that enhancing sexual arousal may be an effective strategy to modulate pain, but this effect has not been successfully demonstrated with women, although it has been successful with men. This study built on previous works and examined if the pain-killing effect of sexual arousal might have been undermined by concurrently-elicited disgust. We tested whether women experience disgust as well as sexual arousal when viewing sex stimuli, and whether disgust has an exacerbating effect on pain. Female participants (N = 164) were randomly distributed to watch a porn, disgust, or neutral train-ride film. A cold pressor test (CPT) was utilized to induce pain at the same time that participants viewed their respective film. Pain was indexed by the duration that participants kept their hand in the cold water, and by self-reported pain intensity at the time they quit the CPT. The results showed no differences in pain across conditions. The sex stimulus elicited substantial disgust as well as sexual arousal, and there was a negative correlation between the two emotions. Disgust was not found to increase pain compared to both the neutral and sex conditions. Thus, the findings provide no support for a pain-modulatory effect of subjective sexual arousal on pain in women. This might, however, be due to the sex stimulus having elicited an ambivalent state between an appetitive and aversive emotion concurrently.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Bert Hoekzema and Remco M. Willemsen for being part of the research team and contributing to setting up the experimental tasks on e-prime, as well as constructing the cold pressor test & measures for it. Thanks as well to the student intern Lena A. Bogdańska, and volunteer students who have assisted with data collection: Amber Z. Sykes, Lara R. S. Baier, Chris Kruize, Amelie M. Harder, and Pauline L. Freytag.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ We adjusted the CPT from the Lakhsassi et al. (2022) study by lowering the temperature from ~4 degrees Celsius to ~2 degrees Celsius in order to create similar conditions to Meagher et al.‘s (2001) study, which found that CPT pain was modulated after inducing sexual arousal in men.

² The pre-registered analysis of covariance with disgust as a covariate was not possible to implement given that disgust ratings varied across groups; this was overlooked during the pre-registration.

³ It was pre-registered that, in this study, we would post hoc re-analyze the hypothesis upon exclusion of participants that were less than 30% sexually aroused/disgusted in the SEX/DISGUST conditions, respectively, or felt more than 30% sexually aroused/disgusted in the NEUTRAL condition. However, participants were not excluded because any threshold for exclusion would be arbitrary and could bias the results given that characteristics associated with low arousal reports may also be associated with participant pain ratings.